From full sleeve to clean slate: Brazil’s onetime most-tattooed man is erasing his past, one laser pulse at a time.
Leandro de Souza, a 36-year-old photographer from Bagé in Brazil’s southernmost state, spent two decades turning himself into a walking canvas.
The Brazilian had more than 170 inkings covering about 95% of his body, a feat that won him the “most tattooed” title at the Santa Rosa International Tattoo Expo in 2023.
After a religious conversion roughly two years ago, de Souza decided to remove the artworks.
He subsequently started documenting the painstaking reversal on Instagram and in local interviews, trading a shock-value aesthetic for a quieter life, steady work and family responsibilities.
The break with his old image was abrupt and personal.
“I didn’t feel good, it didn’t suit me anymore,” he told O Globo. “It was a world of excess, which no longer did me any good. There came a time when I felt like a circus attraction.”
The shift coincided with his embrace of evangelical Christianity and a pledge to stay off drugs and alcohol as he pursues a formal job, pays child support, and seeks to regain guardianship of his elderly mother.
De Souza says the process is punishing — and far harder than getting inked.
“If you imagine that a person goes there to remove one from their finger and already complains of pain, imagine a session on the entire face, which involves three types of laser,” he told G1.
He is midway through a course that could take up to eight sessions, with five already completed on his face.
Announcing that milestone, he wrote on Instagram: “After the fifth session of facial tattoo removal, @helltatto – gratitude, it’s about Jesus Christ.”
The work, performed at a studio in the São Paulo area, has been offered pro bono, according to his posts and local reports.
The shop behind the procedures frames the project as more than cosmetic.
“It’s important to remember: tattoos don’t define character,” the studio said in a caption accompanying a video of his treatment.
“What transforms a life are choices, effort, and the determination to move forward. In this process, tattoo removal is merely a reflection of a much larger internal change that helps align the external image with the new identity being constructed,” the studio said.
The studio has also said he “lost his self-confidence” during a period marked by addiction, homelessness and time in prison, which he has since worked to leave behind.
De Souza’s cautionary note lands squarely on the most indelible real estate of all —the face.
“Think carefully before getting a face tattoo because I regret it,” he told CNN Brazil.
He explained that access and cost once nudged him further than he might have otherwise gone.
“I was in the tattoo business, and back then, I didn’t pay for these face tattoos. I got paid by the tattoo artist I worked with. And I regretted it. I was the most tattooed man in Brazil, and I also tattooed others,” he said.
His stance today is less anti-tattoo than pro-priorities: “Today, I don’t tattoo. I don’t condemn tattoos. I believe that, after baptism and conversion, there are more important things for us to do, my dear brothers.”
Between sessions, he ices and applies ointments, swears by exercise to support recovery, and posts side-by-side photos that chart the fading outlines of once-permanent designs.
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